Wednesday, October 12, 2016

My task this month is to think about something I see
afflicting scores of my students; students I spend the better part of two years
working with, and am invariably therefore extremely invested in the well-being
of: their suitability for life outside our idyllic little campus home. I teach
in a postgraduate institution which is engaged in the business of churning out
"industry professionals" in the area of Communications Management. As
a field of study, the applied area of Management education has come to replace
- or sit alongside, at the very least - the preferred domains of generations of
Indian parents past: medicine, engineering or preparing for the
civil/administrative services.

From the late 90s/early 2000s onward, in our newly
'reformed' and opened Indian economy, the
formulaic pathway to a "good life" - whatever that may mean and
wherever such a mythical beast is to be found - has taken the form of studying
engineering at undergrad level, then proceeding to render that degree
meaningless by not putting it to any use, applying instead for an MBA or its
equivalent after it. I say this based on following general trends across India,
but also from personal experience: in the six years I've been teaching at my
current institute, I've never had a class yet in which fewer than 60% of the students
were engineers. Oh, and a sizeable number of my former students from an
engineering college I used to teach in the Humanities and Social Sciences
department of have also proceeded to apply for MBAs on the other side of their
ICT degrees.

I know for a fact that those who didn't intend to study
after their B.Tech degrees wound up being placed in companies which effectively
viewed them as cogs in a wheel: workers on a new production line, with the
benefit of chairs, computers, and air conditioning over their factory-floor
working brethren. They coded. Endlessly. Without either knowing or being
allowed to ask what it all added up to: that information was on a need-to-know
basis, and they didn't "need to know" it. This is part of the reason
why it pans out that of the last batch I taught at DA-IICT, scores of people
have branched out into fields as diverse as starting tea and mineral water
businesses, acting, working with Members of Parliament, and undertaking PhDs in
Science, Technology and Society (STS), with most of the rest undertaking - you
guessed it - MBA studies.

My contention is simple: the problem of unemployment or
perhaps more accurately, procuring employment suitable and commensurate to a
student's education, is not something we're going to be able to fix simply by
suggesting there is a breakdown between the curriculum a student goes through, the
education system they come from, and their seeming lack of "skills"
in terms of hacking the job market. This is a very simplistic reading which
doesn't, among other factors, account for the shape-shifting nature of
industries - across sectors - in the
hyper-globalising landscape of today: what are the jobs that await these
students? What do they demand of an individual? What is the philosophy that
underpins them? Are they meant to provide job-satisfaction? Is that a possibility
at all, given that most industries today subscribe to (and stem from) the
extractive neoliberal paradigm? To let the needs of the market dictate changes
in curricula without filtering what it is they seek would wreck havoc. It is vital
to remember that education runs the risk of being diminished considerably if it
is calibrated in this utilitarian a fashion. We see this already in the low
intake and funding cuts forced on Humanities and Social Science Departments
world over because they are viewed as frivolous or worse, bourgeois, because
they are not seen as being able to equip students with the immediate skills
they need to enter the world of work. Since when did education become about
just that anyway? Sadly, this isn't a rhetorical question. There is an answer:
it became about little else when education became privatised. Monetised.
Commoditised. When students had to start taking enormous loans to
"buy" themselves entry into the institutions (and networks) that
would get them campus placements on the other side of their time with us. When
students started thinking of education in terms of that curious phrase I encountered
a few years ago, Return on Investment (ROI), giving rise to the specious sense
of entitlement which marks so many exchanges in academic institutions today. This is the kind of brute
neoliberal logic which forces institutions to constantly bear the demands of the
industry they must cater to in mind when designing an educational philosophy or
policy, which, as educators, we are then charged with translating into curriculum
and classroom practice.

I genuinely don't believe that this malaise affects
Millennials alone, but they are the ones who've borne the brunt of the
privatisation of education most. The Millennials are the ones who've had to
incur the loans they'll spend years repaying, many in jobs which may not, by
and large, be particularly satisfying (where they're not actively
soul-crushing). Perhaps it is time to revisit what we define as success; what
drives people to court debt to become part of a system which extracts punishing
costs from those who would be in it; and most importantly, what awaits them on
the other side. I know only this: an extractive economy isn't sustainable.
Ironically, it makes the least business sense. And you're hearing it from a
Humanities major first.